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Fuck the Cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#2
This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like.

I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually destroy them, I'd like that new contacts wouldn't be able to go back and look through someone's entire history. It's like a more social and longer-lived Snapchat.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#3
post #2

This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually…

> I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like.

"This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark).

He's a digital historian; his job is to save everything he can.

https://twitter.com/textfiles

https://archive.org/about/bios.php

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#6
post #2

This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually…

> I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. "This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark). He's a digital historian; his job is to save everything he can. https://twitter.com/textfiles htt…

This seems to be more of a philosophical stance than an argument based on outcomes. It's also a call to think before knee-jerking "the cloud". And I do see the philosophical argument it has merit. But it does lack a business argument [for service consuming businesses] which will win out in most cases.

In other words, in real world usage, the cloud is more dependable and flexible than internal IT infrastructure providers, for most businesses.

That said, there is a good philosophical argument against the cloud.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#8
While Jason Scott raises interesting points six years ago, the principles of data management remain the same as the days of dedicated servers with on premises systems. If you have only one copy of data and that machine goes down, then the data goes with it. In my experience in a business context 'the cloud' discussion is about the business' desire to expand capacity without the need for the capital expenditure needed to buy equipment and server admin salaries. By the numbers it is just better to rent instead of buy at the infrastructure level.

The cloud is a murky, ambiguity-laden concept though. Both Netflix and my 92 year old grandmother on Facebook 'use the cloud', but the former is much more sophisticated in their network and data management practices. My grandmother just wants to see fun pictures of her family and great grandkids.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#10
post #2

This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually…

> I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned.

I really like this idea. The biggest benefit is that it stops people expecting these services to act like an archive. With the current system it's easy to think "Oh I can just look this photo up again on Facebook if I want to". Instead we should be treating these services as publishing platforms while we maintain separate archival versions of our data.

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